I have a brand new Kindle 4.1.0.
I have downloaded a Ru-En dictionary.
It is not possible to use this to get pop-up translations as Kindle do not support cyrillic language. I can browse the dictionary, but that's not very convenient way to look up words.

A few questions.
1. Can I Jailbreak the device such that it supports also cyrillic letters? I'm 99% sure this does not work. At least that's what I understand from other posts about similar issues.
2. Can I Jailbreak the device to add cyrillic symbols in my "keyboard"? And if so, can I use them to search for Russian words in my dictionary? Will it recognice them and find them?

Who said that the Kindle doesn't support cyrillic books? The Kindle can display anything UTF-8, including russian. About the keyboard: I'm pretty sure that there are some hacks out there, but you'll need to search in russian forums.

... and it would appear to support pop-up dictionaries for non-Roman alphabets, given that such dictionaries are supplied as standard with the Kindle for languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Yes, they support Russian written books. I have no problem to read the books, but the dictionaries do not work. At least they are not linked to the books such that I can find the word on pop-up. I can also not search the Ru dictionary as I can't write any cyrillic letters.

I guess it's the hack out there that I'm looking for. I'm not high-tech enough to understand everything out there, and the Russian written forums are too complicated. I'm still quite new into the Russian language.

I've been in contact with Amazon and they confirmed that they do not offer any Russian keyboard or dictionaries to have pop-up function. (of course you can read a Ru-En dictionary by pressing next/previous page buttons...).
They also said it was not possible to do any JB... :- )

The "pop-up function" is language-agnostic, and relies on the metadata of both the book and the dictionary being correct. In other words: the books' language metadata must be correctly set to "russian", and the dictionary's input language must be set to russian too.

I believe that you can use the metadata editor to verify (and possibly change) the metadata, but I'm not an expert on that. Just try it out.

PS: Please update your profile to include your device. This makes it much easier for everyone to see what "constellation" you are talking about.

The "pop-up function" is language-agnostic, and relies on the metadata of both the book and the dictionary being correct. In other words: the books' language metadata must be correctly set to "russian", and the dictionary's input language must be set to russian too.

I believe that you can use the metadata editor to verify (and possibly change) the metadata, but I'm not an expert on that. Just try it out.

PS: Please update your profile to include your device. This makes it much easier for everyone to see what "constellation" you are talking about.

Yes it does, ixtab is right:
I used the Russian-English Dictionary by A. I. Smirnitsky & A. L. Smirnitsky which has the metadata language ru(25), input language ru(25), output language en(9) and the book is 1001 by Sergei Aleksandrovich Rachinskii which has the metadata language ru(25) and which I obtained from the Project Gutenberg

I used the Chinese to English Dictionary from cc-cedict.org which has the metadata language zh(4 Chinese) input language zh(4) output language en(1033) and the book is Zhong Guo Shi Da Jin Shu Guo Shai Tian Xiang by Jing Xin Wu which has the metadata language zh(4) and which I also obtained from Project Gutemberg

P. S. I have absolutely no idea of the subject/meaning of this Chinese book (or of the Russian book in the previous post). Hope my example are not offensive to anyone.

2) With the German-English Translation dictionary by Michael Sheldon which has identical metadata language de(1031) input language de(1031) output language de(1031) (though it would be more representative to set output language to en(1033)).

Survey: When the two dictionaries are present in the Kindle which one would get chosen to pop up the definition/translation of einmal:
a) Always the first one you loaded?
b) Always the the second one you loaded?
c) Either one at random?
d) The first one if it contains the word searched, otherwise the second one?
e) None of them since lab26 code would be too confusing to maintain?
f) All of them since lab26 coding skills are paramount?
g) The Chinese dictionary since nobody would be able to tell the difference?

Great!
I got it working.
The first Russian book I was testing was a .txt file. This has no metadata, so I guess it might not be possible. But I also learned how to create .mobi or .prc files from .txt and then change the language settings. So, now I got it all working also with that book.

Survey: When the two dictionaries are present in the Kindle which one would get chosen to pop up the definition/translation of einmal:
a) Always the first one you loaded?
b) Always the the second one you loaded?
c) Either one at random?
d) The first one if it contains the word searched, otherwise the second one?
e) None of them since lab26 code would be too confusing to maintain?
f) All of them since lab26 coding skills are paramount?
g) The Chinese dictionary since nobody would be able to tell the difference?

Yes it does, ixtab is right:Attachment 98967
I used the Russian-English Dictionary by A. I. Smirnitsky & A. L. Smirnitsky which has the metadata language ru(25), input language ru(25), output language en(9) and the book is 1001 by Sergei Aleksandrovich Rachinskii which has the metadata language ru(25) and which I obtained from the Project Gutenberg

Hey Pop, thanks for the tip! Very cool to get the popup dictionary working with Russian, however I haven't been able to find a dictionary to work well with all the declensions and conjugations in Russian. Where did you find the Russian-English Dictionary by A. I. Smirnitsky & A. L. Smirnitsky dictionary? Any thoughts on getting something like a 'closest match' lookup, i.e. find the word in the dictionary that matches a given word the closest if no exact matches are found?

Hey Pop, thanks for the tip! Very cool to get the popup dictionary working with Russian, however I haven't been able to find a dictionary to work well with all the declensions and conjugations in Russian. Where did you find the Russian-English Dictionary by A. I. Smirnitsky & A. L. Smirnitsky dictionary? Any thoughts on getting something like a 'closest match' lookup, i.e. find the word in the dictionary that matches a given word the closest if no exact matches are found?

Thanks for any input or ideas!

I found it from a link posted here. I think that the dictionary has to be created with all the possible inflections for the declensions and conjugations to be searchable. AFAIK the Kindle does not lookup "closest matches'... closest or partial match would certainly be useful... searching *all* dictionaries too... I'm afraid, it would require a rewrite of the Kindle framework.

Last edited by PoP; 02-06-2013 at 04:03 PM.
Reason: mispelling... bad in a dictionary thread